kyscg's reviews
249 reviews

That self-deprecating Russian humour will never fail to be endearing. For some reason, in my head, I vaguely remember The Overcoat as a story of a man's coat slowly getting worn out until it just ceases to exist anymore. Something like the Ship of Theseus. I don't know if that's another story or if my mind is playing tricks on me.

I have nothing to say about this book that has not been already said, nor can I say it any better. I like Kafka's descriptive style, something I always struggle with while writing. 

One thing I strongly felt was that Samsa and his family should have tried to develop a system of communication with each other. The story might have been very different had his family known he understood them. This is no doubt inspired by my recent reading of The Martian, so take this opinion with a grain of salt.

this is lowkey a parenting guide

What a book!! Incredibly riveting, I would say unputdownable but I was listening to it. Listening to non-fiction is not always easy, because most of them are very dense, and you need to keep track of everything in your head without a physical copy to turn back the pages. Not this one, this was a masterclass in writing.

Like Robinson Crusoe but in the 21st century and on Mars. The exact same archetype, so many parallels. It only deviates in the presence of a third person narrative, the presence of earth's point of view et cetera. Great book, I think the popularity of the book is testament to how attractive our human tendency to survive against all odds is.

Also, what a good scifi book. Instead of having an unrealistic scenario where the science is made up, this book has a very realistic setting and shows us how the only things that limit us are the laws of physics. If we can bring everything down to that, we can fix a lot of problems. I wonder if any other scifi book will get this close to being so technically sound and dense. Watney's character is great, with a lot of life, very Percy Jackson coded.

see my review for The History of Rome by Mike Duncan

and add the Gracchi brothers to the list, it is scandalous that I forgot them, considering how it was them that lit the proverbial powder keg

I picked up this book to fill in my gaps of Roman History apart from the major events. I was fairly well-versed with the time of Julius Caesar until the time of his funeral. And with the Punic Wars. But everything before the Punic Wars, about the founding of Rome, to the seven kings, and the structuring of the senate and society, was all unknown. I also didn't know about the Macedonian Wars that were taking place around the time of the Punic Wars, and how Rome had provinces in Gaul, Spain, and the East (Illyria and Greece). The era of Marius and Sulla, the threat of Mithradates, the last of the strong personalities like Cato the Younger, Pompey, Cicero, Clodius, Mark Antony.

I listened to this along with Mike Duncan's other book, The Storm Before the Storm and now I have most of my questions answered. I think I will pick up with Augustus, move all the why to Nero, and stop there, because that's much more than I am interested in at the moment. There are way too many names for me to go on until the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

It must have been hard to write this book, there are so few accounts of Mithradates that a lot of the book is a retelling of all the myths that surround him. It's not like the author doesn't acknowledge this, but it is more proof that this must have been a very hard book to write. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were definitely sections that were obviously filler and boring to go through. There is also some fanfic in the end.

It is going to be tough for me to review this book. How do you separate the review of the biography from the review of the person? And a person as mercurial, as contemporary, as important as Musk. Elon Musk is not Isaacson's best work, it reads like it was written in a hurry. More importantly, it reads like it was written for Musk, a literary self-portrait of sorts, where Isaacson feels the need to defend every Musk overture. Having said that, it is a great biography, and I've heard that it complements Ashlee Vance's biography and Eric Berger's LiftOff. 

Musk is well and truly alive, and Isaacson spent a lot of time with him around the 2022-23 Twitter acquisition saga. Both these things mean that there is a lot more focus on the recent past, and that is where the book is the strongest. I suspect that the reason for this is we still don't know what actions and decisions are important in the grand scheme of things. On the bright side, we get to see how someone like Musk functions every day. Spoiler: it's right on the edge of every bell curve possible.

If Musk wanted to reclaim some public support, he got it done in the sense that the book reminds readers that Musk is human. That is in a way both redeeming and damning. His impulsive behaviour is very human, and frankly, very normal. His penchant for silly humour, his mood swings, his childlike ambition, flashes of anger, unfiltered enthusiasm for the future, are all very normal. Who among us is a monk? But on the other hand, his tendencies to exhibit his worst sides so publicly and so loudly go against his self-purported vision for humanity. He's wasting energy and proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If he wants to do great things, should he just not focus on doing great things and nothing else?

It would be myopic of me to perform a character assessment from a biography, so I shall stop. The book gives a deep inner look into Musk's personality. The episodes about the treatment from his father are traumatic to read. Everything good about Musk arises from his love of building great things, everything bad about him is his father. A perfect internalization of the worst flaws of his father, only redeemed by the bright light that is the thirst for knowledge. Isaacson keeps this theme alive all through the book, is it not possible to push your troops without also putting them down everytime you enter "demon-mode". Leaders should not confuse ruthlessness in execution with ruthlessness towards their teams.

This leads us to the people this affects, the ones around Musk. Unsurprisingly, most quoted in the book have at best, fanatical grovelling and at worst, grudging admiration for the man. This is not a critique as much as it screams, "the lad doth protest too much". Musk doesn't seem to have anyone that is capable of inflicting withering feedback onto him, again, a common trope among people that wield absolute power. It is my theory that powerful personalities tend to alienate well-wishers because everytime they ignore advice and it works out, they reinforce their belief in their invincibility. The momentum of victory is a drug.

When I read a few other reviews of this book, it was mostly people complaining about how Isaacson didn't spend 300 odd pages of the book discussing emerald mines or some variation of the sentiment. Public sentiment around Musk has never been more polarized and that might make us look at Musk as this recent pop culture phenomenon. But Musk is first and foremost an engineer, and that is the strength of this book. His calls to cut everything unnecessary, and fixate on speed is inspirational. All those anecdotes of him getting rid of unnecessary parts, or shaving of extra seconds in a factory, or condensing problems to their first principles, or finding the right metrics to measure progress are very useful to everyone. So many times when employees are outraged by some suggestion, it's rarely because the suggestion is outlandish, and more because they don't like how certain Musk is about his suggestion.

Musk is important because space exploration is important, because we need electric cars, we want to achieve full self-driving, and more. But Musk is wrong if he think we'll get there with flashes of seriousness sprinkled in a bed of largely irresponsible and impulsive behaviour.

should've been a blog post